Wesley Clark: The anti-war general

The last time Wesley Clark ran for office, he was a high school senior who put his head down on his desk and voted for his best friend, Steve Buchanan. After the student council ballots were tallied, Clark had lost -- by one vote.

Not that he shelved his mountainous sense of ambition, not in the least. Because the next office the 59-year-old camera-ready but controversial retired general would seek was merely president of the United States.

It is that duality -- the selfless Clark and the audaciously ambitious Clark -- that runs through the life of perhaps the most complicated, intriguing and little-known of the nine Democrats who want to sit in the Oval Office.

When Clark burst onto the national political scene this summer on the wind of an Internet-driven Draft Clark for President movement, the punditocracy wondered at first if he were a Democrat or a Republican. Then it wondered if after a military career that carried him move by move to the army's highest ranks, Clark would boldly launch his political career by starting at the top.

Clark is running on the hero myth, that of the vaunted warrior-statesman. He commanded NATO's troops to victory against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo four years after helping to negotiate the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords on Bosnia. His is the pose of a latter-day Eisenhower.

But the myth has some cracks. Few Americans remember or ever understood the Kosovo conflict. There were no ticker-tape parades for the returning conquering general.

What's more, there is a tension and ambiguity to Clark's life story, a prickly side in tandem with his promise. And, much chipping away at Clark's myth has come from an unexpected quarter: the ranks of his former colleagues at the Pentagon. To some of them, Clark has an outsize ego and is an inveterate, self-absorbed climber.

One thing is clear: Clark always wanted to be a soldier, nothing else. His birth father was a politician, a Chicago ward boss, at that. But he died as Clark was about to turn 4, and the boy and his mother returned to her native Little Rock, Ark. As Clark grew into manhood, politics was usually the last thing on his mind. Success, in whatever pursuit, came first.

Clark won an appointment to West Point and finished first in his class in 1966. He then won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England, where he earned a master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1968. He volunteered for duty in Vietnam and earned a Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. While others came home disillusioned from the war, Clark stuck with the military, climbing the Army's ranks with a swiftness that culminated in four stars on his shoulders and command of NATO.

Clark also was a soldier-diplomat who helped negotiate peace in Bosnia during the peace conference in Dayton, Ohio, and was praised for his negotiating skills. Those skills were on display again in the run-up to the bombing campaign against Milosevic's Serbian troops.

In one key meeting at Milosevic's White Palace headquarters in Belgrade, Clark methodically wore down the Serbian strongman -- repeatedly luring him into downplaying the size of his ground forces, then disproving each misstatement with photographic evidence.

"Clark was a facts person," said a NATO diplomatic who was there. "He would argue with very specific facts and get what we needed to achieve."

When negotiations with Milosevic ultimately proved futile, Clark commanded NATO's first military action in 1999. Overseeing an aerial bombing campaign that lasted 78 days, Clark led forces that defeated Milosevic and his army without one American casualty.

If Clark's story ended with the Kosovo victory, his resume would be as pristine and appealing as the anecdote about the student council election at Little Rock's Hall High, where he provided the margin of his own defeat. Add to that a brief, post-military business career that earned him millions and a high-profile gig on CNN dissecting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in a pleasantly authoritative manner, and Clark the candidate begins to take shape.

On paper, he is a template for an ideal Democratic candidate to challenge President Bush. He is a Southerner with strong military credentials. He is telegenic and at ease before the cameras. He is socially liberal but otherwise moderate.

But Clark's military record does not end with the successful conclusion of the Kosovo conflict. It ends, instead, with his abrupt ouster as NATO commander.

Less than a month after Clark vanquished Milosevic in June 1999, his bosses decided it was time Clark should leave. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton offered up a technically feasible bureaucratic explanation: Clark's successor, Gen. Joseph Ralston, would face a loss of rank if he were not promptly assigned to the NATO post.

Clark didn't buy it, then or now.

"I was fired," he flatly said early in November at a Milwaukee campaign stop.

Cohen and Shelton won't say exactly why they bounced Clark. But last summer, Shelton told a reporter: "I will tell you that the reason [Clark] came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. ...Wes won't get my vote."

Shelton has declined to elaborate, and Clark, in turn, has labeled Shelton's criticism "a smear," because Shelton made no specific charge that Clark could rebut. But there were others in the critics' chorus. Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the troops in Iraq, has been quoted saying he was certain Clark would not make a good president. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, in other interviews, essentially agreed with Franks.

Clark is stung, though not surprised, by the criticism. Like any military veteran, he has seen others who got on too fast a track eaten up by those who felt threatened.

Former ambassador to the U.N. and presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke thinks he knows what's happening.

"What's behind the criticism? Jealous generals," he said. "The worst nightmare would be to salute and call him Mr. President or Mr. Vice President."

The Shelton tiff, along with stories that followed about Clark's hard-charging, ego-driven style, made it clear that Clark's military record might be a mixed political blessing. Clark the cardboard cutout -- the "perfect modern officer," as the Washington Post Magazine called him in 1981-- might be as fallible as any politician, but he has yet to develop the politician's experience and survival instincts.

He is a complicated mix. Accomplished but impetuous, politically attractive but brazenly ambitious, Wesley Kanne Clark is a multifaceted person who defies easy categorization. Clark can be jocular and self-effacing, offering an on-target impersonation of Milosevic or telling humorous stories about himself. Or he can be a calculating, tightly wound person whose sense of self is so profound that his first bid for public office is for the most powerful office in the world.

Clark's campaign battle plan argues that an anti-war general can set himself up as an alternative to the maverick Howard Dean, almost taking for granted Clark can defeat Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri.

The strategy is rather simple: Clark will skip the caucuses in Iowa. He plans to finish respectably in New Hampshire, perhaps behind Dean and Kerry, and then place no worse than second in South Carolina and pick up a win in Oklahoma or Arizona. Though Clark's strategy is unconventional, money offers a strong measure of his political viability. For the three-month reporting period ending this month, Clark is expected to raise some $12 million, putting him behind only Dean in fundraising for the period.

The retired general's appeal is layered. He is a fresh, optimistic face, and he has a background with echoes of Eisenhower, though the stronger comparison might be with Gen. Douglas MacArthur -- another general relieved of his command and whose raw ambition made colleagues anxious.

Clark's message goes down well with many Democrats. He is anti-war and would rescind the Bush tax cut to anyone above a middle-class income level. He would boost homeland security spending to $40 billion over two years and direct more funds toward state and local police. Where President Bush has declined to help states with their huge budget deficits, Clark would step in with $40 billion. And he would introduce $20 billion in new investment tax credits

He frames much of his domestic policy agenda in the context of his military experience. In demanding better funding for education, Clark talks about fighting for more money for military families on bases he commanded. On affirmative action, he mentions the military's polyglot ethnic mix.

A new game

Still, in the presidential campaign's early going, Clark the politician has shown he has much to learn, both in style and substance.

His biggest stumble came on an issue with the potential to be his biggest strength: his opposition to the war in Iraq. Clark initially told reporters that had he been in Congress, he would have voted for the war resolution. Then he spent weeks trying to backtrack. Eventually, Clark started flatly asserting that he had been against the war all along, though his opponents aren't willing to let that be the last word.

But by early November, Clark was demonstrating an improved stump style. Responding to an early Lieberman jibe labeling him a "Democrat of convenience," Clark had a ready rejoinder.

"Well, I'll tell you how far off he is," Clark told a crowd in Chicago. "I'm a Democrat by DNA. My father was a Democrat, and in the safety deposit box my mother left me is his credential as a delegate to the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago." Big applause.

Indeed, Wesley Kanne Clark was born in 1944 in Chicago to Benjamin Kanne and his wife, the former Veneta Updegraff. Kanne was a lawyer and Democratic politician who once lost a race for alderman in Chicago's 4th Ward. Kanne also was the son of a Jewish refugee who fled pogroms in Minsk, Russia, to come to Chicago.

Clark didn't learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was married and studying at Oxford, when he got a surprise call from then-unknown relatives visiting from Cleveland. His wife, Gert, recalls a tearful conversation later in which Clark confronted his mother about her decision to hide his heritage.

"I kept it from you because when we were in Chicago, there were clubs that we could not join and people would act in a certain way to us because we were Jewish," Gert Clark recalls her mother-in-law explaining.

Kanne died of a heart attack when Clark was about to turn 4. Even so, Clark says he has memories of their brief life together, including long afternoon drives through Chicago's Hyde Park.

"I felt like the center of my father's life," he says.

Clark also wears a memento of his father: a large diamond Kanne once wore is set in Clark's West Point class ring.

After Kanne's death, Clark's mother took her young son back to her native Little Rock, purchased a one-story, brick and clapboard home and invited her parents to move in. She went to work as a secretary in a local bank, where she met a struggling banker named Victor Clark.

The couple married when Clark was in the 5th grade, and the young boy took his stepfather's name. The new family labored financially, as Victor Clark, a recovering alcoholic, tried his hand at everything from selling mutual funds to running a bait shop.

"He was struggling himself to regain his professional identity and self-respect after going through a bout of alcoholism," Clark recalls. The family's most reliable income came from Clark's mother.

As a boy, Clark enjoyed playing with toy soldiers in the yard. An only child surrounded by adults, he read prodigiously. It was in those preteen years that Clark found his way into the Boys Club of Little Rock, where he was virtually adopted by club director James Miller, who had officially adopted many of his own 12 children.

"Enter You Men of Tomorrow" was engraved over the entrance to the three-story brick building. But it was what was in the basement -- a four-lane swimming pool -- that had the greatest impact on Clark.

With Miller coaching, Clark took up swimming, and it remains an important part of his life. Even on the campaign trail, he orders staff to set aside time for PT -- physical training -- and swims almost daily.

Clark recalls climbing to the top of a trestle bridge over a river outside Little Rock and diving into the water just before approaching cars could spot him and his friends. Years later, as a three-star general, he performed a similar feat by diving from a third-story hotel window into the Adriatic Sea while traveling with presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke during the Bosnia crisis.

In Clark's youth, times were tumultuous in Little Rock with the aftermath of the school integration crisis there. Clark, who attended a Tennessee military academy for his first year of high school, says he has little recollection of the fight in 1957 in which President Eisenhower called in federal troops to force Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus to integrate Little Rock Central High School.

Clark graduated from Hall High in 1962. He had one African-American classmate, Elsie Marie Robinson.

"I knew what she looked like," Clark recalls now, but he said he can't remember ever speaking with Robinson. "I feel really bad about that now," Clark says. "We could have done a lot more to welcome her."

A top student, Clark never became a social standout, and his friends were a group of about 20 high-achievers. By their senior year, the students had gone so far in math that they persuaded the teacher to teach them calculus, even though the high school had no calculus curriculum. He also formed and coached a swim team, though Hall High had no pool. The students practiced at the Boys Club.

In his senior year, Clark's team was to compete for the state championship, but on the morning of the state meet, only three of the team members were healthy enough to swim the relay.

Clark's solution: He swam the breast stroke, took a breather on the pool deck, then plunged in for the concluding, freestyle leg of the relay. The team won the race and the state title.

"Wes never was surprised at any kind of success," recalls a teammate, Phillip McMath. "He expected success. He expected us to win that race."

Though he had considered applying to Harvard, he didn't complete the application; the college education Clark wanted was at West Point. He received an appointment to the military academy, then commanded by Gen. William Westmoreland, and graduated at the top of his class in 1966. However, in many ways, West Point stifled Clark. He chafed at the hazing and rote memorization of meaningless passages.

He joined the swim team and studied math, but by his junior year, Clark had switched to the debate team and begun studying international relations.

Debate "broke the isolation of West Point. It helped put the military experience there in a different context," Clark recalls. "It made West Point bearable for me."

At the academy, Clark studied the campaigns of many generals but came away with a clear favorite: Napoleon. Clark acknowledges Napoleon's lack of respect for democracy and record of atrocities, but admires the way he created the concept of large, well-drilled armies to overpower his enemies. And Napoleon was good on the field.

"He had an eye for battle. He could sense the decision point," Clark says. "He changed the art of warfare."

As a cadet, Clark met Gertrude Kingston, the daughter of a Catholic Charities worker, at a USO dance in New York. As she and Clark started talking, Clark ordered a Manhattan, and then winced at the strong flavor.

"He had never had a drink before that," Gert Clark recalls, laughing. She ordered him a Tom Collins, which he enjoyed, and the two were set on a courtship that soon would lead to their engagement. The couple married after his graduation from the military academy, and they have one child, Wesley Clark Jr., a filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles.

No safe route

Before their graduation, Clark and his West Point classmates had to make choices among the six combat branches during a ritualized meeting in an auditorium at the academy. The cadets' choices would set the course of their military careers. Ranked first in his class, with the top pick, Clark chose the armored branch, the most dangerous of any except infantry. Fellow cadets erupted.

"We all knew we were going to Vietnam," recalls Gaines Dyer, a classmate. "We all knew that Wes had purposely not taken a safe choice. That's why we cheered."

But Clark had won a Rhodes scholarship, and before he went to battle, he pursued studies at Oxford. In the summer of 1966, as he traveled to England, The Beatles had just issued their "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album, marking a growing counter-culture movement.

While at Oxford, Clark stood by his military training and convictions and even traveled throughout England giving speeches supporting the war -- the last such Rhodes scholar volunteer under a U.S. Embassy-sponsored propaganda program.

At one speech in Hull, England, anarchists chased the British police out of the auditorium where Clark was set to speak. At a reception after Clark spoke, a communist protestor confronted him, saying: "You're killing my comrades in Vietnam. Now we're going to kill you."

Gert Clark believes the man drew a knife on her husband. Clark doesn't recall. Both agree the man was removed before anyone was hurt. After a sleepless night in Hull, the Clarks returned safely to Oxford.

Clark left Oxford a year early to begin his combat duty in Vietnam, and his West Point Class of 1966 suffered the greatest number of casualties of any cadet class in that war. In country, while working at First Infantry Division staff headquarters in Di An, Clark converted from the Baptist denomination and joined the Roman Catholic church, his wife's faith.

Five months later, on a patrol in a village north of Saigon, Clark felt a sting in his right hand that he first thought was a bee. He looked down to see his rifle drop from a bloody hand. Then he felt bullets hit his shoulder, leg and buttocks. The last wound embarrasses her husband to this day, Gert Clark says.

Though bleeding and wounded, Clark directed his platoon to strike back. They held their ground until reinforcements arrived. The wounds earned Clark the Purple Heart; his heroism, the Silver Star. Asked recently about the recovery from his Vietnam wounds, Clark went almost mum.

"Let's not make a big deal about that," he says.

Then, unbidden, Clark offered a travelogue of the battle scars. He showed how the first bullet tore away the soft muscle in the curve between his right thumb and forefinger. Clark pulled down a sock to show where another round shattered his shin and ripped away what he calls the "swimming muscle" in his right calf. He pointed to the spot on his right shoulder where another bullet entered.

After Vietnam, Clark received a series of promotions, including a plum assignment as a White House Fellow, where he served with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O'Neill, the former treasury secretary, in the Office of Management and Budget. Soon it was back to active military duty.

Clark was a battalion commander by 1980, a brigade commander by 1986, and commanding general of the First Cavalry Division by 1992 -- the first in his West Point class to reach each level. At the start of this fast track, Clark already had caught the attention of commanders who put him forward to the Washington Post Magazine when it went searching for young military leaders of the future.

Oddly, though, the glowing profile that called him "the perfect modern officer" also included segments that presaged concerns about Clark that have echoed during the 2004 presidential campaign. The article quotes one West Point classmate describing Clark as a man "who took everything seriously, who did not have a lighter side, who would be able to inspire troops and earn their respect, but probably not [be able] to earn their love."

An officer in Clark's battalion described him: "He overshadows the battalion. I don't know anybody who feels at ease with him. Nobody wants to give him bad news, so he has a very overrated opinion of morale and is very defensive about anything that might be wrong."

Such criticisms continue to haunt Clark. They have turned discussion of his career into a parlor game in which people guess who is the real Clark: the man with the four-star resume and made-for-the-middle policy positions, or the career climber with an eye focused on the next rung of the ladder.

Clark's style has at times paid big dividends, and at other times landed him in trouble. It has made him at times seem heroic, at others, almost ridiculous.

While Clark and Holbrooke crossed a mountainous pass during the Bosnia talks, the road gave way under an armored personnel carrier in their convoy. Clark daringly rappelled down to the vehicle. After learning that that only two of nine passengers survived, he climbed back up to inform Holbrooke, the presidential envoy.

"It's the worst thing you ever saw down there," Clark told Holbrooke.

Best, worst of times

Holbrooke developed such confidence in Clark that he assigned him to negotiate, sometimes face to face with Milosevic. But it was Bosnia that also produced one of Clark's most serious missteps: his meeting, without State Department approval, with Milsoevic's most brutal henchman, Serbian general Ratko Mladic. Clark blames a State Department snafu for the lack of prior approval, but only he is responsible for swapping hats and posing for a toothy photo with the suspected war criminal.

"Nobody told me to exchange hats with Mladic. It was something I should not have done," says a contrite Clark.

Colleagues and critics of Clark say the general's experience negotiating the Dayton Peace Accords changed him for good, transforming him from a military man into a general-diplomat who could never simply salute and follow orders again.

Another experience from that period, the unwillingness of the U.S. or United Nations to intervene to stop the massacre of 800,000 people in the Rwandan civil war in 1995, seared in Clark a personal conviction to never let inaction have such grievous consequences again. To Clark's critics, this became proof of a tendency to let his personal moralism interfere with military policy.

It was the Kosovo campaign that would come to bear Clark's personal imprint, and it came to invite the censure of a long gray line of generals. Other former military and diplomatic colleagues paint a picture of Clark as a headline-grabbing, blame-dodging, ladder-climbing politician-soldier who looked out for himself to the exclusion of everyone else.

The relationship between Clark and the Pentagon during the Kosovo conflict started out tempestuous and grew worse. Clark forced the conflict on a Pentagon that didn't see Kosovo as a strategic military interest. When the Pentagon wouldn't approve Clark's plans for a more aggressive posture, including a threat to use ground troops, Clark lobbied with the State Department, the White House and other NATO governments.

Even observers supportive of Clark say he went outside the chain of military command to get his way -- a perspective Clark vehemently disputes.

"I never went around the chain of command," Clark states flatly.

Clark argues that his job as NATO commander was a "two-hatted" position, partly a U.S. military job and partly a diplomatic post, as commander of the 19-nation NATO troops. It required him to deal with heads of state and to make political assessments for the secretary of state and other White House officials.

"I don't think Gen. Shelton and Secretary Cohen ever appreciated that that was an essential part of my job, and that was what I had to do to hold [the NATO coalition] together," Clark says.

His approach didn't go over well at the Pentagon.

"When you get people who are secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs, they are not wallflowers," observes a general who worked with Shelton and Cohen during the Kosovo campaign. "They want to hear from you before they hear from the secretary of state [Madeline Albright] what you told her to do."

Moreover, the Pentagon source adds, Clark in his push for ground troops and other aggressive actions got caught up in a duel with Milosevic that compromised his judgment.

"He got personally involved. It became more of a personal vendetta than an operation that was based solely on military judgment," the source says.

Clark seemed to enjoy TV news conferences so much that Cohen directed Shelton at one point to order Clark to "get your . . . face off the TV." And Clark caused a diplomatic furor near the end of the Kosovo campaign with a furious push to send British troops to prevent Russian forces from seizing control of the Pristina Airport. Ultimately, British commander Michael Jackson refused Clark's order to block the Pristina Airport with a memorable, if overheated rejoinder: "Sir, I'm not starting World War III for you."

Even some of Clark's biggest supporters think he acted defiantly in dealing with Cohen and Shelton.

"Wes was clearly going around them and trying to set up the conditions to achieve victory," says retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former Operation Desert Storm commander who spoke frequently to Clark, Cohen and Shelton during the Kosovo campaign.

That hasn't stopped the Clark campaign from trying to disprove the criticisms.

In early October, Clark released more than 187 pages of performance reviews and commendations in which Clark is repeatedly rated as a superior motivator and leader of his troops.

"A great leader who takes care of soldiers and families," wrote Gen. Edwin Burba Jr.

Clark's campaign also readily provides the names of people who found Clark a likable leader while they served under his command.

One independent source, the lawyer at a Little Rock-based company where Clark served as a lobbyist and board member after retiring from the military, recalls visiting the Pentagon with Clark.

"If you're going to the Pentagon with Wes Clark, you'd better plan on an extra 10 or 15 minutes so you have time for all the people who want to come and say hi to him," says Jerry Jones, of Acxiom Corp., a database company based in Little Rock that specializes in retrieving financial information about private citizens.

It was that kind of star-quality popularity that helped fuel a draft movement encouraging Clark to run for president. Although Clark seems to think the Kosovo campaign made him a star, his broader celebrity came at least in part from his stint as CNN's military analyst, giving rise to the Draft Clark campaign on the Internet.

Mickey Kantor, the former Clinton trade representative who is among Clark's most active advisers, acknowledged that Clark struggled early. But he thinks he has found his footing.

"The language was new and the challenges were great," Kantor observed. "He's performing at a high level now. It's a steep learning curve, and he's learning every hour and every moment."

It's almost like being back in school. Except this time, when it comes to Election Day, Clark won't put his head down. And he won't vote for anybody else.

BORN: Dec. 23, 1944, Chicago. LIVES: Little Rock, Ark., where he moved age 4 after his father died. FAMILY: Wife, Gertrude Clark; son, Wesley Jr., filmmaker in Los Angeles. CAREER FIRSTS: Graduated at top of West Point Class of 1966.Was first in class of '66 to achieve ranks of brigade...